‘How handsome she is!’ exclaimed honest Lucy Denzil, looking back after the angular form of Lady Alice, and the graceful figure that contrasted so strongly with the bony awkwardness of the school-girl; and Lady Maud echoed the praise, and Lady Gladys smiled approval. The Earl’s second daughter was, as has been said, very lovely, and her golden hair and blue eyes had produced the usual effect of fascinating for the time being Jasper’s fickle fancy. It is quite possible to be very hard and at the same time very weak where women are concerned; and Captain Denzil, wary man of the world as he boasted himself to be, and selfish as he certainly was, could not at the moment resist the spell of the enchantress.
‘Cripple as I am,’ said Jasper, glancing at his injured arm, ‘you see that I could not resist the temptation to come when you asked me.’
‘They are not my pheasants; they are Maud’s, you know,’ returned Lady Gladys, as though wilfully misunderstanding him.
‘Fortunate birds!—that is if you condescend to take an interest in them,’ said the captain, nonchalant as ever, but contriving to throw into his tone and look a something of suppressed tenderness, that was not perhaps wholly feigned. Ruth Willis saw the look, although she was not near enough to overhear the words, and her eyes flashed and her white teeth closed sharply, almost savagely, on her pouting lip. She felt the mortification which an angler might feel did he see the half-hooked salmon, the silvery patriarch of the pool, desert his bait, and leap provokingly at the artificial fly of some rival disciple of Piscator. She could not forget how, an hour or two ago, the heir of Carbery had deigned to devote to her service those very tricks of manner—in her anger she mentally called them so—which now before her very eyes he was practising for the benefit of another. She did not care for him; but he piqued her, by the very effrontery of his fickleness, into attaching to him a value which in calmer moments she would never have set on one so intrinsically base as Jasper Denzil.
In spite of world-old experience and sage aphorisms, each sex remains to some extent a standing problem to the other. So Ruth Willis, nettled, baffled, wrathful, still did not fathom the depths of Jasper’s worthless nature one half so clearly as she would have done had her keen powers of observation been exercised at the expense of a woman. She even felt angry with Lady Gladys, though most unreasonably, for the proud beauty wore her most glacial armour of chilling haughtiness when she perceived that Jasper was disposed to pay her what is popularly known as ‘marked attentions.’
The innocent pheasants, the ostensible end and object of this expedition, were duly inspected, and lavishly fed with the millet and barley, the chopped eggs and crushed maize, which young pheasants love. They were fair enough to look upon, these shy pretty captives, still timorous and bewildered by their close confinement in the darksome baskets wherein they had been crammed by the irreverent poultry-merchant who had consigned them to High Tor; and not yet quite at home in their new abode, which had been so freshly decorated for their reception that the paint on the wood and the lacquer on the wires were barely dry. Golden pheasants there were, and white or silver pheasants, and pencilled pheasants, worthy descendants of a feathered ancestry that had pecked and strutted in the gardens of coral-buttoned mandarins, in far-off China.
The curious thing was, that except by their mistress Lady Maud and the elder of the two Denzil girls, who was a kindred spirit, the pheasants were scarcely looked at with regardful eyes. Is it not always so? At launch or military review or polo-match, or when a princely trowel of pure gold condescendingly applies a dab of sublime mortar to a glorified foundation-stone of some new building, how very, very few of the nominal spectators concentrate their thoughts and their vision on the show, which the reporters will presently describe with such graphic power! Private affairs, hopes, fears, interests, are all of them petty magnets sufficient to neutralise the great avowed attraction of the hour.
There was Ruth Willis, her whole attention stealthily concentrating itself upon Captain Denzil at the side of the Earl’s second daughter; there was Jasper, vainly trying to thaw the ice of Lady Gladys’ disdain; and Lord Harrogate, whose thoughts seemed at times to wander away from the present scene and company. Add to these Blanche Denzil, sorrowfully conscious that Lord Harrogate himself, in whose eyes she would have given much to find favour, was thinking of anything rather than of her preference for him, and it will be seen that the real amateurs of fancy pheasants were but in a narrow minority.
A good girl who loves a man worthy of her esteem, yet who is constrained by maiden modesty and the rules of good-breeding to hide away the sentiment as though it were a sin, deserves more pity than often falls to her lot. It is never Leap-year for her. She cannot be the first to speak. And if there be one point upon which men are exceptionally blind, it is to the perception that their merits may be highly appreciated by some young lady to whom they never give a thought when absent from her. Poor Blanche had trouble enough now and then to keep down the rising tears that welled up to her eyes as she noted twenty signs of the painful fact that Lord Harrogate regarded her with that amicable indifference which cannot readily ripen, as dislike sometimes can, into love. But Blanche was too gentle to grow bitter over a disappointment, as did Ruth Willis, although for her too the pleasure of the day was damped and dulled.
The visitors from Carbery would not, on getting back to the broad gravelled drive where the basket-carriage awaited them, re-enter the house. They had taken leave of the Earl and Countess, and declined all hospitable proffers of luncheon beforehand. There was some kissing among the girls and a good deal of hand-shaking, and then the ‘double basket’ again received its living load, and ‘good-bye’ was said, and off dashed the mettled Exmoor ponies under Lucy Denzil’s guidance.